Diamond Lore And Gore

For Baseball Historian, The Game

Is Mostly A Matter Of Life And Death

Baseball historian Richard Topp delights in telling the story of Jack Powell, a pitcher for the St. Louis Browns in 1913, and how he died.

Powell, whose major-league career spanned two innings, was an unknown in baseball annals until Topp and his team of researchers got to him.

They found a 1930s newspaper article in Memphis that said Powell moved on to vaudeville when his pitching career failed.

``Powell billed himself as the world`s fastest eater,`` Topp said. ``He would order a steak, cut the steak in half and bet people in the restaurant that he could eat the steak without chewing it. He, of course, lost eventually,`` Topp said.

Ed Delahanty, who played for the Philadelphia Phillies at the turn of the century, also is on Topp`s ``accidental death`` list. After he was thrown off a train near Niagara Falls for being drunk and disorderly, he walked across a bridge over the Niagara River, slipped and fell in.

Topp, 41, keeps these stories and all sorts of facts and figures in his head. If he can`t remember a detail, a computerized data base and several shelves of reference books are handy in the living room of his basement apartment on the Northwest Side.

``We`ve come across some wild stuff. Our suicide list is beautiful,`` he said.

Art Irwin, who played for various clubs in the late 1800s, made the list. He jumped overboard during a trip from New York to Ireland because he had a wife and children in Boston-and in Hartford, Conn., Topp said.

Another, Marty Bergen, played for the Boston Braves` predecessor in the 1890s and ``did a Lizzie Borden number on his wife and kids`` before killing himself. Bergen, a catcher, had been injured and was despondent during the off season, Topp said.

Topp, a trivia buff who knows all the lines in ``Casablanca`` and is good at the geography category in Trivial Pursuit, worked as a hotel accountant until July, when he began doing research full-time for the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia.

He now spends much of his time tracking down biographical data on the major league`s 13,000 players. He frequently goes to libraries and cemeteries and has been known to visit players` long-lost relatives in search of a clue about a birth, death, height or weight.

Several years ago, he called on a 100-year-old nun in Dubuque, Ia., the daughter of Timmy E. Manning. All that was known of Manning is that he was born in Chicago and a player from 1882 to 1885 for various clubs. Topp, who needed more statistical information on the player, had seen Manning`s death certificate and knew he was buried at Calvary Cemetery in Evanston. The cemetery put him in touch with Manning`s church, which led him to a 75-year-old grandson who told him about the nun in Dubuque, who provided all the vital statistics.

Topp`s wife, Barbara, said that since she met him about 12 years ago, her husband has been tracking a Chicago Cubs player. They even went to a cemetery in Amboy, Ill., ``that wound up being literally in the middle of a cornfield.`` But they found nothing on Joseph Quest, who played from 1871 to 1884 and who had disappeared after a scandal in the Chicago city clerk`s office, where he worked as an accountant after leaving baseball.

Deaths are especially interesting to Topp. ``You`ve got to do a death. It`s a part of life. A person lives and a person dies. We just want to know where, when, sometimes how,`` he said.

Topp, who shares his findings with the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., was hired by Macmillan as a statistical consultant for the 1991 edition of the baseball encyclopedia because of his reputation for biographical research. ``He`s considered the nation`s leading expert,`` said Rick Wolff, senior editor and director of sports books at Macmillan in New York.

Bill Deane, a senior research associate at the Baseball Hall of Fame, receives monthly reports from Topp. ``He`s very persistent in tracking down leads to the point where he`ll go out in zero-degree weather to look at a gravestone,`` Deane said.

Topp and other researchers at the Society for American Baseball Research have found thousands of errors in past editions of the Macmillan encyclopedia. Topp said they act as ``sleuths, detectives, private eyes`` in their search for information.

``It`s an obsession. You want to get it right. We have one member in Chicago who researched all the Cubs games of 1930, and one of the ultimate untouchable records is Hack Wilson`s 190 runs batted in. Well, it`s actually 192,`` Topp said.

Proving records wrong, busting myths and setting the record straight are priorities for the researchers. ``We have fun doing this,`` Topp said.

The society, with about 6,500 members worldwide, counts U.S. Atty. Gen. Richard Thornburgh, George Will, David Letterman and Larry King among its members. It was founded in 1971 to publish baseball research.